Friday, April 03, 2009

Gmail Is Now 5 Years Old

Gmail has successfully completed the journey of five years. Gmail was launched in April 1, 2004. That time a typical webmail account could only store about ten megabytes of mail, where Gmail came up with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer that time.

The engineers who created Gmail were frustrated with the existing email solutions, and wanted to build a better tool for people who got a lot of mail, which meant rethinking everything from the ground up. They built an architecture that was a combination of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which offered a smoother, faster interface. And they designed Gmail with the most demanding users in mind — Googlers who got hundreds of messages each day and power users with broadband connections, back when 56k modems were still the norm.

Within last 5 years, there has been many changes and new features added to Gmail and probably Gmail is now an essential part of our day to day life.